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Tougher testing for students in state

Last Modified: Wednesday, December 26, 2012 1:11 PM

BATON ROUGE (AP) — Louisiana’s public
schools are starting a three-year shift to more rigorous testing of
public school students,
using a set of uniform standards that education officials say are
designed to better prepare students for college and careers.

The transition will change what items
are included in the standardized tests given each spring to students in
third through
eighth grades and in the end-of-course exams given to high school
students. It also changes how teachers instruct their students
to account for the new types of assessments used in the tests.

“We’re not talking about more tests. We’re talking about tests that are going to be a little more difficult. They’re going
to call our students to a higher level of rigor, and they’re going to call our teachers to a different type of teaching,”
said Superintendent of Education John White.

Changes, for example, include questions
that are more open-ended and require written responses, rather than
just multiple
choice answers. Math questions will call for students to justify
their conclusions, while English questions will seek short
essays to analyze reading passages.

Louisiana is joining 47 other states around the nation in moving to the “Common Core” standards, which were developed in a
joint process among states seeking to have a set of uniform benchmarks for what students should learn in English and math
classes by the time they graduate.

The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education adopted the new standards in 2010, and White said they will be fully
phased into Louisiana’s curriculum and testing by the 2014-15 school year, replacing testing standards developed more than
15 years ago. Questions also have been revamped for science and social studies testing.

The implications are widespread, since
student performance on standardized tests is used to judge school
performance, to determine
the letter grade awarded to a school and to evaluate teachers and
determine if they reach and maintain the job protection
status of tenure.

“This is a major reform initiative that will affect every child in the state of Louisiana in every school system,” said Scott
Richard, executive director of the Louisiana School Boards Association.

This spring, standardized tests will
have a small number of English questions that match the new, tougher
standards, with
other questions “field-tested” but not counting toward a student’s
score. A year later, all the harder questions will count,
but will remain only a small portion of the test. By the 2014-15
school year, White said the more rigorous questions will
make up the whole test.

“It’s a big shift to fundamentally recalibrate what is expected of students,” White said.

But the change to Common Core standards also will compel an adjustment in teaching strategies and techniques, and local school
leaders have expressed worry about how they’ll pay for the technology upgrades and training time that they say are needed
to make the switch.

“We support increased rigor, but with attention to detail and proper funding to make it happen,” Richard said. “Districts
are having to find funding in an already tight budget climate to make sure it’s implemented with effectiveness.”

State spending on the public school
financing formula has remained flat for several years, increasing only
to account for
new students added to the formula and to school districts. Richard
said the education department hasn’t been providing the
intensive, direct assistance and guidance to local school
districts that was expected with such a substantive shift in testing
standards.

White said small teams from each school
district have been trained on the Common Core standards, who will then
train others
in their districts. He said his department is giving those
district leaders instructional tools to help them with the shift
to the new standards.